Counting intersections

Emily Badger you might remember her from her great article on slugging in DC has a fantastic post canadian goose jacket on street map design over at The Atlantic Cities.

Emily canada goose uk black friday Badger you might remember her from her great article on slugging in DC has a fantastic post on Canada Goose sale street map design canada goose black friday sale over at The Atlantic Cities.

Garrick and Marshall research into street network patterns began in Davis, California. Often cited as the most bike friendly city in America, it has the country highest rate more canada goose coats on sale than 16 percent of people commuting to work on two wheels. It turns out, though, that Davis also has one of the lowest traffic canada goose uk shop fatality rates in the country, a counterintuitive Canada Goose online discovery for traffic engineers who consider biking a riskier alternative to driving.

Inspired by Davis, Garrick and Marshall Canada Goose Outlet compiled data on 230,000 crashes spanning 11 years in 24 medium sized California cities. And they uk canada goose began to parse Canada Goose Coats On Sale and classify street patterns in a kind of taxonomy. There are networks that look like square grids buy canada goose jacket and others that resemble trees, with one trunk, many branches. There are networks that have tributaries, like a river, and others that have main roads radiating out from a central hub. There are hybrids Canada Goose Clearance of all these, and street blocks of different lengths, and networks that have 45 intersections per square mile (like Salt Lake City) and others that have cheap Canada Goose as many as 550 (Portland, Ore).

In their California study, Garrick and Marshall eventually realized the safest Canada Goose Online cities had an element in common: They were all incorporated before 1930. Something about the canada goose clearance way they were designed made them safer. The key wasn necessarily that large numbers of bikers produced safer cities, but that the design elements of cities that encouraged people canada goose uk outlet to bike in places like Davis were the same ones that were yielding fewer traffic fatalities.

These cities were built the old way: along those monotonous canada goose grids.

When streets are built to a Canada Goose Parka human scale, rather than canada goose coats being built for cars, those streets are friendlier and safer. More generally, the metric of intersections per square mile is an incredibly useful idea to keep in mind. It correlated with density, but it not the same thing at all. But the one labeled BAD has ten intersections, while the one labeled GOOD has only seven. And of course the distance you buy canada goose jacket cheap need to travel to get from Canada Goose Jackets any random point to a given house is much shorter, on average, in the BAD map than it is in the GOOD one.

Shorter distances mean that canada goose clearance sale you more likely to walk or bike; they also make the neighborhood feel smaller. For many decades, suburbia was designed on the idea that Americans want to feel as though they far away from each other, but the fact is that we need community and linkages just as much cheap canada goose uk as we need a space of our own.

A city with high density still feels inhuman if it has enormous blocks; it doesn matter how many people you squeeze into downtown Phoenix, it will never feel like a vibrant, high density city. Even in New York, the distance between 5th Avenue and 6th Avenue is far too big: the shorter blocks east of 5th Avenue, between, say, 5th Avenue and Madison Avenue, are much more pleasant, as are the small blocks in the Financial District.

It astonishing canada goose canadagooseoutlete store to me that Portland and Salt Lake City can differ, in terms of intersections per square mile, by a factor of more than 12. According to Wikipedia, Salt Lake City has a density of 1,666 people per square uk canada goose outlet mile, compared to Portland 4,288. Which means that Portland has almost five times as many intersections per person as Salt Lake City does canada goose factory sale.